Back at the Great Expectations. Food's not bad, but pricy; beer is
much better. Images follow:
cc-by-sa on
everything.

Just two games for me tonight. I got started with a couple of
rounds of
Codenames, a
recent and very popular game from Vlaada Chvátil. It's deceptively
simple: one player on each team (blue and red) is the caller. 25 cards
with words on them are face up. The caller has to tell his team which
cards have his own side's markers on them on the map, which he can see
and the rest of the team can't; he does this with a two-word clue, a
number and a hint-word which should identify the cards. If they get
their own side's cards, good; if the other side's cards, the other
side's that much closer to winning; if the single "assassin" card,
they instantly lose.

This seems rather Hanabi-like, with the same formal and limited
information, but the callers really need to change each round or
they'll get awfully frustrated. Quite fun, but not one I'll rush to
play again.

The same could be said of
Brew Crafters,
which I finally got a chance to try out. It's a fairly abstract
Euro-style game: you're buying ingredients to brew beer, but some of
them are harder to find than others, and you have to balance that with
expanding your workforce, expanding the brewery with new functions,
doing research to get better at various actions, and so on.

I enjoyed the game, though it probably went on about half an hour too
long to be ideal, but wasn't surprised to come in last. This is a game
for which one really has to plot one's strategy from the beginning,
and stick to it – but several appealing-looking ones, such as
concentrating on one style of beer, aren't as rewarded as they might
be.